“The Secret Of Life, Though, Is To Fall Seven Times And Get UpEight Times.” – Paulo Coelho
This next quote comes from the 1988 novel, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I love this one because it states something that at first read seems so obvious, yet when we’re in the midst of life and its difficulties, it’s something we tend to forget. When something doesn’t go the way we want it to over and over again, it’s not always easy to keep trying and keep moving forward. We may feel like a failure or feel too tired to keep going, but the truth to life is that it’s impossible for things to always go the way we want them to. If they did, it wouldn’t be life. It would simply be a fairy tale and as much as I love Disney movies, life is not a fairy tale.
You can’t fail if you don’t give up. Whether we keep trying for the same thing and it’s not working or we keep trying for many different things and it’s still not working, we must not give up. Perhaps we need to try a different way to achieve something or try for something else. Either way, we must keep trying and keep getting up. Life is a series of falls, but the falls are not important. The getting back up is important. As long as you keep getting back up while being on this Earth, you will never stay down.
And I don’t just mean literally getting up. I mean the will and motivation to keep going. There have been many times in my life when I was SO tired of not achieving certain goals in time or not being able to keep people or things in my life in the way I wanted to. I often paused and asked myself why I should even keep going. Why I should keep expecting things to suddenly click. Thankfully, something inside of me told me to keep going even when I wasn’t sure why. Then I realized something, and to be honest, I’m still in the process of realizing it everyday. I realized that all the things I want to achieve aren’t all just suddenly going to click at one special moment. There will never be a moment when I feel I have everything I want at the time that I want it. Life just doesn’t work like that.
True happiness isn’t about being successful at everything and never falling. True happiness is figuring out how to get to where you need to be and how to make a difference in the world. Inspirational people haven’t always been successful. They had to fall many times to achieve things and the getting back up is what made them inspirational. Think about it. Even when we reach big goals we have worked many years to get, there will still be letdowns to be had and struggles to go through. We can’t predict what will come easy and what will take work, but we can embrace the falls and understand that being on the ground sometimes is simply a mere reminder that we need to get back up.
You may fall seven times and you may fall twenty times. You may even fall hundreds of times, but no matter how many times, always remember to get up again and again. You can never get to where you’re going if you don’t. Glow & shine bright! xo